Michael Chabon

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Michael Chabon (SHAY-bon), born May 24, 1963, is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. He first published The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) when he was 25 years old.

He continued it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections.

In a 2007 review of a later book titled Chabon's magnum opus, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a book by John Leonard.

In 2001, it was named the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His book The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery book, was published in 2007 and received the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula, and Ignotus awards; his serialized book Gentlemen of the Road debuted in book form in the fall of the same year.

In 2012, Chabon introduced Telegraph Avenue, describing two families' turbulent lives in San Francisco's Bay Area.

Chabon's latest book, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather based on his deathbed revelations under the influence of potent painkillers in Chabon's California home in 1989, followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016. Chabon's work is characterized by ambiguous words, the frequent use of metaphor in conjunction with recurring themes, such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most importantly issues of Jewish identity.

He frequently includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his stories.

Chabon has written in a slew of styles for various publications; he is a leading promoter of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction; and, alongside novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.

Early life

Chabon (pronounced, in his words, "Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Bon Jovi") was born in Washington, D.C., to a Jewish family. Robert Chabon, a surgeon and prosecutor, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer, are among his parents. Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when he wrote his first short story for a class assignment at the age of ten. "I thought to myself,'" the author says when the tale got an A. That's what I want to do. 'I can do this,' And I had no second thoughts or doubts." He wrote of being raised "on a hearty diet of crap" in response to popular culture. When he was 11, his parents divorced, and he grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, Maryland. Columbia, where he and his mother spent nine months of the year together, was "a multicultural planned living community in which racial, economic, and religious plurality were vigorously promoted." He has written about his mother's use of marijuana, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a tiny metal pipe back and forth before going into to see a movie." He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mother's parents and siblings.

Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon's first book, was published as his UC Irvine master's thesis. Although some first-time novelists get advance under $7,500, they can't tell Chabon, his instructor, MacDonald Harris (better known by his pen name, MacDonald Harris), who gave the author a huge $15,000 advance. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh first appeared in 1988 and became a bestseller, boosting Chabon to literary fame. Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garca, Márquez, John Updike, Philip Roth, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among his notable literary influences during this period. "I just copied the writers whose voices I was responding to," the author said in 2010, "and I think that's probably the best way to learn."

Chabon was ambivalent about his newfound fame. He turned down bids to appear in a Gap ad and be named as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People." "I don't give a shit [about it]," he later said of the People's offer. I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. It's just strange to be lauded for something like that. It seemed as if someone were calling and saying, 'We want to put you in a magazine because the weather's so nice where you live.'

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Chabon reflected on the success of his first book by saying that although "the upside was that I was published and I received a readership," [the] downside was that this stuff was still happening and I was like, 'Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?' It took me a few years to catch up." He released A Model World, a collection of short stories, many of which were previously published in The New Yorker in 1991.

Chabon spent five years in Fountain City, a "highly ambitious opus about an architect constructing a fantastic baseball park in Florida" after the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. With no end in sight, it grew to 1,500 pages. Chabon, who wrote "never felt like I was on stable ground," said the author.

He submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the assignment at one point. Chabon had trouble breaking the book, but not for the first time. Later, he said, "It was really scary." "I'd already signed a deal and been paid all of this money." And then there was a divorce, and half of the money was already with my ex-wife. 'This book is fucked,' my guts were telling me.' 'Just take it off.' But I didn't because I was afraid, 'What if I have to give the money back?' "I used to go to my office and wonder what all the books I could write instead." Chabon has confessed to being "careless and sloppy" when it came to his novels' plots, describing how he "again and again falls back on the same basic story."

Chabon's father, a young man with a tendency toward melodrama, stares at his empty computer for hours before finally picturing "a straitless, troubled young man with a tendency toward melodrama, trying to end it all." He began writing and had written 50 pages of What became his second book, Wonder Boys, in a matter of days. Chabon based his story about Grady Tripp, a sarcastic novelist who has spent years on an immense fourth book, on his experiences with Fountain City. He wrote Wonder Boys in a seven-month streak, but never told his agent or publisher that he had left Fountain City. The book, which was published in 1995, was a commercial and critical success.

In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment" from Chabon's unfinished 1,500-page Fountain City manuscript was included in McSweeney's 36.

Jonathan Yardley, a Washington Post writer, was one of the supporters of Wonder Boys; however, Yardley argued that Chabon had been preoccupied "with fictional investigations of his own" as a result. It's time for him to move ahead, to break away from the first person and explore the larger worlds. Chabon later explained that he took Yardley's criticism to heart, adding, "It chimed with my own thoughts." "I had higher hopes" than before. Werewolves in Their Youth, his second collection of short stories, delves into genre fiction, was released in 1999, and the grim horror story "In the Black Mill" was included in his collection of short stories.

Chabon discovered a box of comic books from his youth, sparking renewed interest in comics, as well as memories of his Brooklyn-born father's "legene" during the twentieth century in America. "The radio shows, politicians, movies, music, and celebrities of that period pushed him to start writing a new book." He published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a massive historical book that chronicles 16 years in the lives of Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, two Jewish cousins who produced a wildly popular series of comic books in the early 1940s, during the United States' entry into World War II. The novel received "near unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller, eventually winning the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. "I discovered strengths I had hoped for," Chabon wrote about in Kavalier & Clay, "the ability to pull off many points of view, historical locations, and the passage of years, but that had never been tested before."

Chabon's Summerland, a fantasy book written for younger readers that received mixed feedback but sold well and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, a national recognition. He published The Final Solution, a novella about an investigation led by an unidentified old man, whom the reader can guess to be Sherlock Holmes, during World War II's last two years. The Dark Horse Comics project, which was published from 2004 to 2006, purported to cull stories from an intimate, fictitious 60-year history of the Escapist character created by the protagonists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay's. The 2005 Eisner Award for Best Anthology and two others for Best Anthology and Best New Series were given.

Chabon completed work on Gentlemen of the Road, a 15-part serialized book that appeared in The New York Times Magazine from January 28 to May 6, 2007. Chabon characterized the serial as "a swashbuckling adventure story set about the year 1000" at one point. The author revealed his next book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, right before Gentlemen of the Road's publication, which had been in existence since February 2002. The book, which was released on May 1, 2007, a hardboiled detective story that imagines an alternate history in which Israel collapsed in 1948 and European Jews settled in Alaska, was the subject of soaring sales and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was also a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Award.

Chabon said in May 2007 that he was working on a young-adult book with "some fantastic stuff." The author revealed that he had cancelled plans for the young-adult book and instead signed a two-book contract with HarperCollins a month later.

"Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son" was the first book-length non-fiction book published in spring 2009 (2010 in Europe); "being a man in all its chaos" was the subject; the book includes a son, a father, and a husband." The collection was selected for the 2010 Northern California Book Award in the Creative Nonfiction category. This was Chabon's second published collection of essays and non-fiction. On May 1, 2008, McSweeney's Maps and Legends, a collection of Chabon's literary essays, was released in McSweeney's. The book's proceeds went to 826 National. Chabon received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, which is also given every year by the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Library Trust.

Chabon talked to the Washington Post in 2007 about his second book under contract, saying, "I would like it to be published in the present day and have the urge to do something more mainstream than my recent work has been." Chabon said during a Q&A session in January 2009 that he was writing a "naturalistic" book about two families in Berkeley. Chabon said in a March 2010 interview with the Guardian newspaper, "So far there is no overtly genre news: it's in the present day and has no alternative reality or anything like that."

The televised Avenue, which originated from an idea for a TV series pilot that Chabon was invited to write in 1999, is a social novel set that follows a "wide cast of characters grappling with infidelity, fatherhood, crooked politicians, misogyny, mistrust, nostalgia, and buried mysteries." In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Chabon expressed skepticism about "the possibility and impossibility of creating shared community spaces that aim to push the boundaries set on us by our roots, culture, and history." Telegraph Avenue's five-year gestation period, Chabon told the Guardian newspaper, "I got two years into the book and felt like it was a complete disaster." "I had to start all over again, but the plot was completely revised and leaving almost every element behind." Chabon, who began with literary realism in his first two books and progressing to genre-fiction experiments from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay onward, feels that Telegraph Avenue is a significant "unification" of his older and later styles, saying in an interview, "I could do whatever I wanted to do in this book and it would be okay, even if it focused on magical realism." I was open to all of this, and yet I didn't have to condemn or steer away from the naturalistic tale about two families' lives and dealing with pregnancy and birth, adultery, and corporate suicide, among other things that might have influenced a book written in the style of mainstream quote-unquote realistic fiction, which was another genre for me to read in. According to Chabon, film director Scott Rudin (who previously optioned and produced Wonder Boys) has optioned the book, and Cameron Crowe is adapting it into a screenplay.

Chabon's public lecture and reading of the book in Oakland, California, listed creative influences as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Altman, and William Faulkner.

Moonglow, Chabon's most recent book, was published on November 22, 2016. The book is a quasi-metafictional memoir based on Chabon's grandfather's deathbed confessions in the late 1980s.

Writers Confront the Occupation, a non-fiction collection of essays by writers about the continuing Israeli takeover of the West Bank and Gaza, including contributions from authors including Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Geraldine Brooks, was released in summer 2017. Chabon co-edited the volume with Ayelet Waldman, and they both contributed essays to the collection. Chabon had previously contributed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times in June 2010 in which he discussed exceptionalism in Jewish identity in connection with Israel's botching of the Gaza flotilla attack and the subsequent explanations.

Fatherhood in Pieces was first published in May 2018. Pops is a short non-fiction memoir/essay collection, with the essays being thematically linked by the rewards and challenges of various aspects of fatherhood and family life.

Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros, Chabon's next non-fiction book, was published in January 2019. This volume is a series of introductions, afterwords, and liner notes that Chabon has contributed to several books and other projects over the years, as well as Chabon's own literary influences and reading advice. The book serves as a fundraiser for MacDowell, to which Chabon is contributing all royalties.

Chabon said in an interview with the American Booksellers Association promoting Moonglow in November that his next fiction project would be "... a long overdue sequel, but not a sequel" to Summerland, my book for a younger audience. It's something I've been trying to get to for a long time."

Despite his popularity, Chabon maintains that "anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the retention of a favorable word."

Amazon.com, a major book retailer, was embroiled in a dispute with Hachette, a publisher, in 2014. Hundreds of writers, Chabon included, had sluggish in an open letter since Amazon stopped taking pre-orders for books published by Hachette.

Chabon was mistakenly published in a Newsweek article on up-and-coming gay writers (Pittsburgh's protagonist has relationships with people of both sexes). Later, the New York Times announced that "in some ways, [Chabon] was grateful" for the magazine's mistake, and quoted him as saying, "I feel very fortunate about all of it." To me, it's really opened up a new readership and a very loyal one." "If Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it's that people can't be put into categories all the time," Chabon said in a 2002 interview. "I had slept with one man I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to sleep with him." Chabon wrote in "On The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," an essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2005: "I had slept with one man whom I adored" a book.

Chabon married poet Lollie Groth in 1987. The success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had adverse effects, according to Chabon; he later explained, "I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer, and the loss created a gross imbalance in our careers, which was problematic." In 1991, he and Groth divorced.

In 1993, he married Israeli-born writer Ayelet Waldman. They and their four children live in Berkeley, California, together. Chabon has said that the "creative free-flow" he has with Waldman inspired Sammy Clay and Rosa Saks' friendship toward the end of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as well as the lack of alcohol.

Chabon said in a 2012 interview with Weekend All Things Considered that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, from Sunday to Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Chabon referred to the rigidity of his routine, saying that "there have been a lot of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your office done every day." They're long, and they're heavy, and they're long, and they have a lot of words in them. A very stable, structured way of life is the most healthy environment for me."

During his 2008 race, Chabon was a vocal endorser of Barack Obama and penned a ferocious opinion piece on Obama for the New York Review of Books, titled "Obama & the Conquest of Denver." Chabon's 2012 book 'cameo' appeared in a short, fictionalized 'cameo' by Obama.

Chabon has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump both during his presidency (signing a petition with over 400 other writers opposing his candidacy in May 2016) and during his administration. "I have no idea what to expect in a chat with The Guardian before Trump's inauguration in January 2017." He's so unpredictable. He's so mercurial. I'd be no more surprised if he stood up there and declared amnesty for all illegal immigrants to the United States than if he said he'd shot them all out to be fired. He's like a random impulse generator." "Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of excitement and a sense of optimism" and "notice that this is going to be rushed out of the White House on a gurney."

Personal life

Chabon's debut in a Newsweek article on up-and-coming gay writers (Pittsburgh's protagonist has relationships with people of both sexes). "Chabon] was apologetic" for the magazine's omission, according to the New York Times, who quoted him as saying, "I feel very fortunate about all of it." It opened up a new readership to me and a very loyal one." "If Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it's that people can't be categorized all the time," Chabon said in a 2002 interview. Chabon wrote a story for the New York Review of Books in 2005 titled "On The Mysteries of Pittsburgh": "I had slept with one man I adored and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to sleep with him."

Chabon married poet Lollie Groth in 1987. According to Chabon, the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had adverse consequences; he later explained, "I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer" and that the result, which was unfortunate." In 1991, he and Groth married.

In 1993, he married Ayelet Waldman, an Israeli-born writer. They and their four children live in Berkeley, California, together. Chabon has said that the "creative free-flow" he has with Waldman inspired Sammy Clay and Rosa Saks' relationship towards the end of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as well as the pairing's "famous” writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles with word processors and not so much booze.

Chabon said in a 2012 interview with Weekend All Things Considered's Guy Raz that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, from Sunday to Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Chabon wrote about the rigidity of his routine, "There have been a number of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day." If you want to write novels, they take a long time, they're huge, and they have a lot of words in them. A very stable, arranged way of life, is the best environment for me.

During his 2008 race, Chabon was a vocal supporter of Barack Obama and wrote an enthralling opinion piece on Obama for the New York Review of Books titled "Obama & the Conquest of Denver." In his 2012 book Telegraph Avenue, Chabon added a brief, fictionalized 'cameo' by Obama in his short, fictionalized 'cameo'.

Since 2016, Chabon has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, both during his presidential campaign (signing a petition with over 400 other writers opposing his candidacy in May 2016) and during his administration. "I have no idea what to expect in a televised interview with The Guardian before Trump's inauguration in January 2017. He's so unpredictable. He's so mercurial. You know, I'd be no more surprised if he stood up and declared amnesty for all illegal immigrants to the US than if he said he'd take them all out to be shot. He's like a random impulse generator." "Every morning, I wake up and in the seconds before turning my phone on to see what the new news is, I have this unbridled sense of excitement and fear that this is going to be a huge stroke and, you know, be carted out of the White House on a gurney."

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